Yahoo News Ink, theatre review: James Graham's stingingly astute take on The Sun is headline news
James Graham is theatre’s new master of political intrigue. Best-known for 2012's This House, in which he depicted a hung parliament and expertly documented the murky business of negotiation and compromise, he here turns his attention to journalism — Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun and the reshaping of Britain’s tabloids at the end of the Sixties.
Even-handed in his treatment of the Australian mogul who transformed the complexion of mass media, he’s nonetheless stingingly astute about the cheapening of news values and Fleet Street’s cult of a cynical cruelty that masquerades as fun.
Bertie Carvel’s performance as Murdoch is the big draw, and from the moment he first appears, arguing over dining arrangements and promising to be an iconoclast, he resembles Shakespeare's Richard III, hunched yet flamboyant.
His recipe for success is to appoint Daily Mail staffer Larry Lamb as The Sun's editor and tell him to make the paper ‘loud’. There’s much talk of giving people what they want — frequently indistinguishable from telling them what they want — and Lamb’s Sun embraces gossip, celebrity culture and Page Three girls in a bid to unseat the Daily Mirror as the country’s bestselling paper.
Graham has plenty to work with, not least the kidnap of the wife of Murdoch’s sidekick Alick McKay. But although Ink is a history play, catching the tone of a particular moment, it’s also a highly topical vision of the sour effects of populism.
Rupert Goold’s production pulses with energy, occasionally threatening to turn into a mischievous musical. Designed with a fine eye for writers’ messiness by Bunny Christie, it’s packed with zesty performances.
As Brian McConnell, a scholar of macabre crime who served as Lamb’s news editor, Justin Salinger has a nice mix of furtive cunning and eccentricity. Pearl Chanda brings a peppy candour to Stephanie Rahn, the first ever topless Page Three model, and Sophie Stanton revels in the forthrightness of Joyce Hopkirk, who was Lamb’s resident oracle on all things to do with women and was later responsible for piloting the UK launch of Cosmopolitan.
The role of Hugh Cudlipp, whom Lamb set out to emulate and then surpass, belongs to David Schofield. He captures the canny instincts of a man whose professional obsessions were controversy and the demolition of taboo, while also suggesting how his authority declined after his heyday in the Fifties.
Yet at the play's heart is an extraordinary image of the Faustian pact between The Sun's owner and editor. While Carvel’s Murdoch is a brilliant portrait of a ruthless operator who’s both elusive and spellbinding, Richard Coyle’s finely observed Lamb is a bold and boyish figure who seems simultaneously deft, ambitious, enthusiastic and sinister.
Graham's three-hour epic is occasionally overloaded with expository detail and meanders a little in its second half. But, buoyed by his trademark appetite for asking awkward questions, it’s a shrewd and absorbing look at journalistic ethics.
Until Aug 5, Almeida Theatre; almeida.co.uk
